Dark
by Femvamp
Summary: SPOILERS FOR SEASON 2 Finale. Stop reading here if you don't want to be spoiled. It took them two months to find her.


Title: Dark

Author: Femvamp

Disclaimer: Fringe and its characters don't belong to me. I am just playing with them for awhile. I'll put them back when I am done.

Spoilers: OVER THERE PART 2

**A/N: Takes place after the end of Season 2 Finale. – So be warned.**

She slept with the lights on now. She would never tell anyone but she was terrified of the dark. Darkness, silence, and confined spaces freaked her out. She tried to hide it from the people she loved; the people who loved her but she knew they knew. Peter always made sure the light stayed on in the bathroom and he bought her a nightlight. When he gave it to her he made a joke about getting the wrong kind for Ella and that Walter didn't want it either. She took it gratefully but pretended to be in a huff about it. Peter let her. He was kind that way.

She knew he felt a great deal of guilt for not recognizing the imposter earlier. For almost a month she had lived in their mist. No one had noticed the differences. Not Peter, not Walter not even her sister or niece. Not until she made a fatal mistake and Peter had become suspicious enough to follow her to the old typewriter store. He put the pieces together then. It had taken them another month before they had found a way back into the alternate universe to get her.

Two months she had been trapped in almost complete darkness. The only light came when her captor, the other Walter Bishop decided to check up on her. He didn't want her to die but to be trapped in darkness forever. He made sure she had food and water but every thing else she did without.

She spent her waking hours thinking about Peter. She was sure he would come to get her eventually. The Other Walter Bishop, Mr. Secretary, spoke to her on a couple of occasion making sure she knew that he had sent the imposter to seduce Peter; to bring Peter back to him. Her goal was to bring Peter home and to cause as much trouble on her side as she could.

Mr. Secretary never told her why he kept her alive. Why he didn't just kill her; it might have been more humane if he did, but instead he kept her in the darkness; in the silence with nothing to do but think.

When they finally found her she had almost convinced herself that it was an illusion and that Peter wasn't really there, that Mr. Secretary had set a trap for her, but then Peter kissed her and she knew it was him. It had to be him; her mind couldn't handle any other option.

She briefly wondered it this was how Walter felt, her Walter, the kind Walter; the Walter who she saw as a father which was odd in its own right considering the horrible things he had done to her as a child. However she had gotten used to the odd things in her life and she let it go. Her Walter was not the same as Mr. Secretary. They were different men. Just like she was different from her imposter.

They were just different,

When she got back home they had all treated her extra-special nice like they were making up for something. She knew it was guilt but she was too frightened to care. In those early days she needed them too much to be angry at them. The anger came later when she found out that Peter had slept with her imposter. That he had fallen in love with the imposter thinking it was her. She tried to forgive Peter for that but she didn't think she ever could and yet she let him take care of her. She even let him love her.

Just like he had loved the imposter.

At night when Peter was asleep she wondered if he missed her. If he preferred the imposter to her. Was she nicer to him? Was she funnier? Did she smile more? Peter once told her that the thing that had made him suspicious was that he never saw the imposter drinking alcohol. Not a drop. That one day that made him suspicious he had witnessed her pouring her glass of wine into a plant. She wondered if that was a good thing to notice; a person's drinking habit. She wondered it that was the overriding difference about them that she liked to drink. Is that what people noticed about her?

She knew it wasn't Peter's fault for not realizing the truth. Her imposter wore her face. She tried to put herself in his shoes. She hadn't realized that Charlie had been an imposter either, However the Charlie imposter wasn't really Charlie just someone who wore Charlie's face. This imposter was her. In every way that mattered they were the same person, at least on the outside. They had lived very different lives.

It wasn't any of their faults for not noticing.

Not even Walter Bishop who had started it all. It was rather poetic in a Shakespearean sort of way. The war between the universes had started over two men's love for their son. Or maybe it was more a Greek tragedy.

Either way she was cast as either a villain or a hero, maybe both depending on what universe she was in. In hers she was cast as the tragic heroin in the other she was the villain who shared the face of the….it was way too complicated to think about, and yet each night with Peter next to her she thought about it.

She thought about a lot of things.

Mostly she thought about how she hated the dark and the silence.

And she wondered if she would ever really sleep again.

Until Peter started to snore, and she could finally close her eyes,

Because her world might still be dark, but at least it wasn't silent.


End file.
